Applicant has previously invented apparatus for the treatment of cooling tower water to control scale, corrosion and biofilm, using electronic oxidation and ionization apparatus. The national stage of this invention, PCT/US97/00885, is pending in the United States as Ser. No. 08/983,376, with an international filing date of Jan. 17, 1997, and the entire contents of this application are hereby incorporated by reference. The electronic oxidation and ionization apparatus is further disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,007,994 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,603,843, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference. A divisional of U.S. Pat. No. 5,603,843 is still pending as Ser. No. 09/252,389, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Applicant has been testing its electronic oxidation and ionization apparatus in connection with pullet, layer and production facilities and has discovered major unexpected advantages to its method of treating water in connection with the health of the poultry. These advantages include decreased mortality, increased weight gain of pullets, lower feed conversion, better vaccine results, greater egg production, lower labor costs, lower maintenance, and easier operation of the processing plant.
As is well known in the art, poultry drinking water is provided by H.sub.2 O lines connected to drinker cups and/or nipples. The drinker cups have a white ball attached to a nipple, which fill the drinker cup with water. Drinker nipples are held in place by water pressure in the H.sub.2 O lines, so that they are normally closed. The bird pushes on the nipple to open the nipple to allow water to drip out. Scale formation has been a major problem in the past in connection with drinker cups and H.sub.2 O lines. The valve mechanism includes a seat and ball, and scale forms between the seat and the ball, which prevents the nipple from closing, so that the drinking cup leaks. Leaking drinking cups cause several problems. First, the poultry are stacked in cages, so that if a drinking cup at the top of the stack is leaking, poultry below will get wet. Secondly, the manure on the ground will get wet, which is undesirable since this produces ammonia, which is hazardous to the poultry and maintenance personal. Also, the poultry does not consume the water fast enough and the remaining water becomes stagnant with a bad odor or leaks and drips on the poultry litter. The water in the drinker cups can also become contaminated with feces and bacterial growth. Chlorine cannot be used to clean the drinker cups because the poultry does not like the smell. The poultry will back off drinking water from the drinking cups and drink poor quality water elsewhere, which can make them sick, and causes them to eat less. The poultry gut flora gets destroyed so that the poultry cannot absorb nutrients correctly. The poultry can get secondary infections and suffer from dehydration. All of these health problems result in poorer quality poultry, and poultry with higher mortality rates.
What is needed is a method for treating poultry drinking water which solves the problems discussed above.